CONCERNS
Benefits:
Nuclear medicine is a safe, painless, and cost-effective way of gathering information that may otherwise be unavailable or require a more expensive and risky diagnostic test. One unique aspect of a nuclear medicine test is its extreme sensitivity to abnormalities in an organ's structure or function. As an integral part of patient care, nuclear medicine is used in the diagnosis, management, treatment and prevention of serious disease. Nuclear medicine imaging procedures often identify abnormalities very early in the progression of a disease long before some medical problems are apparent with other diagnostic tests. This early detection allows a disease to be treated early in its course when there may be a better prognosis.
Although nuclear medicine is commonly used for diagnostic purposes, it also has valuable therapeutic applications such as treatment of hyperthyroidism, thyroid cancer, blood imbalances, and any bony pain from certain types of cancer.
photo and text courtesy of http://nuclearmedicine.stanford.edu
Safety:
The radioactive materials used in Nuclear Medicine have very short half-lives, which means that they decay rapidly into a harmless material. Often, the injected radioactive material is only inside the body for a very short time, and the total dose of radiation is small -similar, and sometimes even less than, many other kinds of X-ray procedures. About twelve million nuclear medicine exams are performed every year in the United States .
safety courtesy of http://bidmc.harvard.edu
Risks:
Because the doses of radiopharmaceutical administered are very small, nuclear medicine procedures result in exposure to a small dose of radiation. Nuclear medicine has been used for more than five decades, and there are no known long-term adverse effects from such low-dose studies.
As with all radiologic procedures, be sure to inform your physician if you are pregnant. In general, exposure to radiation during pregnancy should be kept to a minimum. Allergic reactions to the radiopharmaceutical can occur, but are extremely rare.
Nuclear medicine procedures are time-consuming. They involve administration of a radiopharmaceutical, obtaining images, and interpreting the results. It can take hours to days for the radiopharmaceutical to accumulate in the part of the body under study. Imaging can take up to three hours to perform, though new equipment is available that can substantially shorten the procedure time.
risks and limitations courtesy of http://www.radiologyinfo.org